Great news everyone! Amazon has just announced the list of semi-finalists of the AWS Global Start-Up Challenge and…

we made it to the semi-finals!

Wikidot has been selected among five other contestants in the Consumer Applications category: Appy Couple, LogMyCalls, Hive, Magnasoft NorthStar and Powhow.

We are really glad that Wikidot has been recognised as a great web project and for its usage of AWS services. Congratulations to all semi-finalists and good luck!

Wikidot has been running 100% on Amazon Web Services since September 2012 and utilises several AWS-based services: computing instances, autoscaling, storage, load balancers, monitoring and several management tools. Wikidot also uses Chef to manage and configure up to 40 server instances.

On behalf of our whole team I would like to wish all of you Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Quanza or just Happy Holidays! It is always a special time we used to spend with our families and the ones we care about most. It is time to get strength for the upcoming year — and I guess this is what we all need.

I wish you all best. Wisdom, peace of mind, strength and patience. And success, whatever success you wish for right now.

For us, each year brings new challenges. I am really glad we can go through them with you — our great community. At Wikidot we are taking some time off to get ready for whatever new challenges and opportunities await us. Keep your thumbs crossed!

The deal is simple — purchase or prolong any of our paid plans (Pro Lite, Pro or Pro Plus) at a discounted rate and enjoy the awesome premium features! The deal will last the whole week till 30. November.

To upgrade your account, please go to Account >> Upgrade and choose your plan. The panel will show the discounted prices.

Last week we introduced a new feature people had been waiting for — fine-grained view permission settings for page categories. The view permission allows you to set who can view a given page category: let it be everyone, just Wikidot users, members of your site or just admins and moderators of your site.

The new option allows granting the view permission to the user who created a page. A small addition, but as you will see it opens a number of possibilities — you can now hide pages from everyone, while allowing users to create pages and view the pages they create.

Imagine a drop-box system where you want your users to leave messages as wiki pages so that you and a given user can read the page and comment on it. At the same time you want to keep the conversation hidden from other users. The new permission settings make it easy to set up.

I would like to show a small example of a system collecting feedback which works just as described. It will use 4 major Wikidot features:

1. Templates and Data Forms
2. Autonumbering
3. Permissions
4. Listing pages

Wikidot services have been unavailable during the last hour today, between 17.30 and 18.20 UTC. The problems have been caused by some disks going down at our datacenter. I will post more details later on. We are still working on improving performance because Wikidot still operates on reduced number of servers.

We often see popular community-driven sites that go far beyond the free (or even paid) plan limits or need a specific "pro" feature. Admins often ask us to upgrade their sites to actually allow them to develop their sites and in numerous cases we gladly do it.

But in the end we believe that community wikis require a different approach, which should not only provide all required features to grow, but also accelerate their growth.

Today we would like to announce a new category of sites at Wikidot:

Community Sites!

It is a new kind of sites that combine the best things we have at Wikidot:

1. Free!
2. More capable than Pro Plus!
3. Extra promotion - we will help your site get more popular
4. Direct support from our team!

As most of you know, one of cool Wikidot features is traffic analysis. For each site (actually only paid sites till now) we collect available traffic information and every few hours we analyze it using popular analytics software AWStats. The result — number of page views, visits, traffic sources, browser info, crawler stats and tons of other metrics — is then available from within ManageSite panel.